THE BUNDLES ARE UNSUSTAINABLY BIG.

At the start of the year, I reviewed two political books, Where Have All the Democrats Gone and Party of the People, written respectively by Democrat and Republican operatives, that came to surprisingly similar conclusions about the assembly of presidential majorities.

Both books raise a common point, which is that popular Federal policies are policies that majorities or large pluralities of voters perceive benefits therefrom: thus Medicare or Social Security, even unto the fiscal cliff these are about to fall off of; thus roads and bridges, even though the latest highly touted bipartisan bill doesn't make good the continued deterioration of the existing roads or bridges; never mind that these areas of mutual interest are areas of wishful thinking, and that people live lives apart from their commutes and their retirements.  Thus the problem: to win elections, particularly at the national level, the Democrats seek to cobble together a coalition of people who oppose the death penalty, whilst favoring abortion, sex change operations, and easy immigration.  The Republicans seek to cobble together a coalition of people who favor the death penalty, whilst opposing abortion, sex change operations, and easy immigration.  For both parties, that cobbling works only up to a point.  A better policy bundle for the Democrats might be more about the kitchen table issues and less about the boutique multiculturalism; but that is also available to Republicans with the right way to take on the social and political status of the degreed Professional Managerial Class.  Thus the broad areas of agreement among those authors: in the view of all three, the electorate is very much up for grabs.  At the presidential level, though, we're drifting toward a rerun of 2020.

As I type this, news is breaking about former president Donald Trump being convicted for falsifying business records, with knock-on effects that are yet to play out.  I fear those effects will only complicate the challenges of those unsustainably big bundles.

In a recent Claremont Review of Books article, William Voegeli (whose observations on the failures of higher education we have noted previously) also pairs the books and notes in his own way the unsustainability of national political coalitions.

Electoral politics is all about effecting net additions to your coalition, while avoiding net reductions. There are no free lunches, in economics or politics. To be able to add from one group of voters without risking losses from other groups is a rare luxury. The usual situation is that making some people happier ends up making others angrier. Even being a populist loudmouth has an upside. Among the theories Ruffini discusses for Trump’s surprising success with Hispanic voters in 2020 is that his “blunt language” played especially well with white and Hispanic working-class voters, who place a premium on direct, forthright speech. The fact that Florida governor Ron DeSantis got so little traction in his campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination argues that there is, at least with Trump 1.0 still available, little appetite among Republican voters for a Trump 2.0 who is less provocative and entertaining but more conversant with the details of formulating and implementing public policies.

The challenge of making additions that are bigger than the subtractions is common to all democracies, but more pronounced in America. Our first-past-the-post electoral structure guarantees a two-party system, since third parties have no realistic hope of wielding power. But America’s size, diversity, and endless socioeconomic churn also guarantee that each of the two major parties will amount to an awkward assortment. “The whole secret of politics,” Kevin Phillips told an interviewer in 1968, is “knowing who hates who.” Such knowledge makes clear which groups are impossible coalition partners. The corollary, knowing which groups can at least abide one another, is the basis on which the work of assembling a majority coalition can begin.

I suppose the implications of the Arrow impossibility theorem leave me less troubled by the difficulties of coalition-building, because the easiest way to avoid the problem is to take as many decisions as is practicable at the lowest level of aggregation.  Unfortunately, the cult of the presidency and the emergence of national virtual platforms for sharing information make more politics national than used to be the case.

In our age of social media and the hollowing out of regional journalistic outlets, politics has become national. As the Columbia Journalism Review reported in 2020, “The New York Times has more digital subscribers in Dallas-Fort Worth than the Dallas Morning News, more digital subscribers in Seattle than the Seattle Times, more digital subscribers in California than the LA Times or the San Francisco Chronicle.” The result, David Shor told Politico, is that “when people are voting on their local House candidate, they’re increasingly doing that on the basis of the news they read about the national Democratic Party.” Democratic candidates in competitive districts and states across the country can expect to be put on the defensive about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just as their Republican counterparts can expect to be put on the defensive about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Very few Democrats ran in 2020 on a promise to defund the police, for example, but the fact that the few who did remained members in good standing within the party meant that calls to defund the police became every Democratic candidate’s problem.

However advisable it may be for each of our two major parties to revise its mission statement to better comport with its most promising electoral coalition, that change won’t be easy and may not be possible. Each party stands for what it stands for due to powerful internal forces exerted over decades. There’s no rebranding switch that will painlessly yield a new identity.

Adopting more modest manifestoes, limiting the number of positions of National Importance, might be hard to do, and yet that approach might turn out to be more successful.  Mr Voegeli offers a long elaboration on why that "rebranding switch" might not work.  He might be correct.  And yet, failure to look for that switch isn't going to turn out well, either.

It is easy, then, to see why each party’s rebranding is imperative but hard to see how either effort succeeds. Both Democrats and Republicans can draw consolation from the knowledge that it will not be necessary to perform the work perfectly, or perhaps even competently. It should suffice to secure the inside track to electoral dominance by becoming the political party that does the second-worst job of revising its raison d’être in order to assemble the coalition that might most plausibly secure a durable majority. An old joke about two imperiled hunters ends with one telling the other, “But I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”

That's encouraging. We have much to look forward to.